Prototypes

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Archive for the ‘Harvest’ Category

Harvest: Massive Encounter is part of the Indie Royale Summer Bundle, together with 8 other cool games. Please check it out: http://www.indieroyale.com/ Also, buying the bundle gives you the game both on Desura and Steam

It’s over 1.5 years since we wrote about the 1.17 update to Harvest, and finally we’re able to release an updated version. It won’t be 1.17, but 1.18 (fixing a couple of more things), and this time also with builds for Linux!

The game changes are:

Invert scroll direction setting

Added drag-and-place buildings, if you keep the mouse pressed the game will place the next building at the edge of the energy range from the previous one

Made it possible to select and sell multiple buildings at once, also added “getSelectedBuildings” Lua hook

Added an option for the defenses to hold fire

Shaded map edge

Map expansion marker line

Double-size minimap for resolutions larger than 800×600

Changed damage calculation of missile turrets

Removed the age limit of solar plants

Removed the boss aliens

Energy links will attempt to avoid sending energy to links that are pointing towards itself

Made it possible to change language setting in the settings menu

Changed so that Poseidon and Ares are unlocked by gaining award points

This daily deal was supposed to be coordinated with the long-awaited 1.18 update of the game, and also the fresh Mac OS X version on Steam. Unfortunately there seems to have been some kind of misunderstanding with Steam, so this update has been delayed. We’ll post again when the update is released!

One of our forum members, known as “Doublevil,” has made a pretty rad mod for Harvest. It plays more like a standard tower defense game, with upgradeable towers and enemies attacking your base in a straight line. Doublevil has put a lot of effort into it, you should definitely check it out! You find it here:

The mod suffers from a crash bug, unfortunately. It occurs sometimes when you upgrade towers, and is likely one of the bugs I’ve fixed for the long lost 1.17 patch… and I still don’t know when we’ll be able to release it…

I usually try to avoid posting more than once per day, but I nearly forgot which date it was today… it’s the 5h of March! That means we have two birthdays to celebrate!

First up is Pontus Hammarberg, our own very cuddlesome artist who is trying to save mankind, one life at a time He has turned 26 today. Give him a cheer! (And in case you were wondering, Pontus goes by the internet alias “Kinten”, you may have seen him around.)

Second up is Harvest: Massive Encounter that is 2 years old today! It’s crazy how long time that has passed since its release, and how different things are now compared to back then.

To celebrate this we are going to give you a present! We are going to send out postcards (real, physical postcards) to anybody who wants one. All you need to do is to give us your home address (we’ll not use it for anything else, don’t worry), and maybe suggest a name for Project B! Anything goes, but obviously we prefer actual usable game names over “Cheesemaster of Death 2000″ The best name will receive an extra present… I think.

In any case, suggesting a name is optional, so to receive a postcard all you have to do is to go here:

We’ll gather addresses for about 2 weeks. I’ll post again later. (We may not send a postcard to everybody in case this becomes unexpectedly popular, since I have to write all of these by hand… so if that happens it will be first come first served.)

/jeb

UPDATE: Remember to write your NAME with the address! Our divine senses can only stretch so far…

Two weeks ago a box full of stuff dropped into our mailbox at the office. (I don’t go to the office very often these days, so that’s why I’m not posting about it until now.) The package was from Daniel Wolf, who wanted to pay for a bet that he lost over two years ago. To thank him for his effort, I decided to record this clip:

Almost three years have passed since I made the first Harvest prototype. I recall it was a wednesday and I had “this idea I just needed to try,” and never got out of my bathrobe that day. The idea was based on the concept that I wanted to make a mining game where the challenge would be to get power from the plant to the harvesters. The aliens (originally green goblin heads) and defense towers were quickly added afterwards, creating the basis of what would become Harvest: Massive Encounter.

This concept has in turn inspired other game developers to make their own implementations. The first time I heard of one of these “clones” I was really shocked. It was the same kind of feeling as when we discovered that Harvest torrents were available on the same day as we released the game. It wasn’t a good feeling, but now when I look back at it I see how irrational and childish that feeling was. We should be proud that the game was worth being inspired by!

In addition, the game was The Space Game by The Causal Collective, and David Scott & Paul Preece were super cool about it and even added us to the game’s credits. Since then three more clones have appeared, and in truth I think some of these are more inspired by The Space Game than by Harvest… In any case I thought it would be fun to write a small blog post about them. (They are listed in the order that I heard about them.)

This is the most famous of the “harvest games.” It’s even more famous than Harvest itself, so sometimes I read in comments and forums messages like “oh, this looks like a browser game I played somewhere…” The Space Game expands on the idea with missions and more options, while simplifying a few things to make it runnable as a browser game. Pretty neat!

I’m not actually sure who has done this game. It was posted to the TIGSource forums by the mysterious user “anpd,” and s/he didn’t give any website or other personal information. The game itself doesn’t contain any readme either, so I’m lost there. In any case, what I’ve seen is an early 3d prototype which allows you to place laser defenses and energy links.

I don’t know much about this game except that it’s available for iPhone from the AppStore. I would guess this game is more inspired by The Space Game than by Harvest, though. We had plans for making an iPhone version of Harvest, but those plans were stopped by lack of motivation (and funds, actually, because we couldn’t afford to keep on working like we did). I don’t think our version would bring the game to space, though…

So there you have it! I fully expect more games to come, please let me know if I’ve missed any.

As you already know, Oxeye is run more or less like a hobby, so things get done in the order they are fun and we have energy and time to make them. That means we’ve accumulated a lot of unfinished projects (because finishing projects is not as fun as starting them), so I’ll begin this year with a small list of stuff that aren’t “done” yet, and what our “plans” for them are.

The Harvest 1.17/1.18 Patch – I still intend to finish and release this patch, but unfortunately the Mac OS X version just keeps crashing on me. I’ve spent a whole weekend cursing at xcode to no avail, and I’m not looking forward to wasting another weekend on the same problem. You could say that I’m waiting for some kind of divine intervention, and who can tell when that is going to happen…
Also, I want to add more features to this patch before I release it. I realized that it would probably be possible to allow mods for other game modes than creative, as long as I make sure that all “cheating” methods are disabled. That would be quite nice, since it would allow people to make user interface mods and so on.

Harvest Lua Documentation – I started moving our forum documentation into our Oxeye wiki, but that quickly became really boring, so it’s also unfinished. I’m not really planning to finish it anytime soon, but I’ll make sure that whenever I change or add stuff to the mod system, the documentation on the wiki will be up to date.

jeb <3 RTS – The RTS Design article series I did (over a year ago now) is also unfinished. I think the reason I stopped working on it was because I had already written my most important points, and the remaining articles were derailing a little too much. I also got some critisism that my articles were too Starcraft’y, so I need to take one step back and look at the subject in a more general way.

thewreck’s Retrospective – I’m not the only one here who isn’t finishing projects Daniel Brynolf, who is better known as thewreck, has made a lot of small games in MMF over the years, and was writing an article series about them. The first article is here, http://www.oxeyegames.com/thewreck-in-retrospect-part-1/, but the second one is still a draft in our wordpress backend. Pontus (Kinten) even wagered 500 kr (roughly $60) that thewreck would never write the second article. He said, “the money is safe with me,” and so far it looks like he’s right.

So there it is. I’ll make a new year promise that during 2010, we’ll start more projects that we won’t finish!